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All nuclear plants are not created equal. The far far bigger problem is continuing to use early reactor designs past their end of life! It's like a 30 year old car that has not spent those years in a garage. It needs considerable work to stay usable, often to the point of requiring it to be rebuilt. Well the same thing holds true to nuclear plants, but we just don't spend that sort of money renovating the old ones. So they start to fail. How much effort is actually required to have severe problems is rather interesting, but I for on do not expect them to simply keep working.

We should have continued building and updating designs over the last 30 or 40 years, but anti-nuclear nuts have left us all pretty damn screwed.

It isn't just the "nuclear nuts", though they probably haven't improve the R&D supply. Properly decommissioning a plant, especially one that really deserves it, is not inexpensive, and turns a reasonably profitable(once the construction/startup expenses have been amortized or written off) baseline unit into a big cost center. There is, thus, a strong built in incentive to keep patching and running as long as possible. Best case, you can continue to use the plant as a generating asset. Worst case, if you've had to make a number of repairs that compromise capacity, it may well still be cheaper to keep the lights on and the plant "operating" than it is to tear it down.

The precise degree of regulatory capture at any given time is going to be a politically determined matter; but you really can't expect any other stance: Nuclear plants are very expensive to build, and very expensive to decommission; but the cost of fuel is low, and the cost of temporary-turning-into-permanent-on-an-installment-plan 'disposal' of fuel is also fairly low. Thus, unless the maintenance situation is so bad that you have a crack squad of Godzilla slayers on staff, the economics are basically never in favor of replacement if you can keep the sucker running. Even if you can't, decommissioning costs are likely t dwarf the costs of putting it on some sort of "standby" and leaving it until you can retire away from the problem.

It's very much unlike, say, gas units, which are pretty cheap to put up and tear down; but burn fairly expensive fuel(and, worst case, just sort of explode a little bit, spreading not-very-scary natural gas combustion products), where the economic incentives to take down old plants and put up more efficient ones work out comparatively well.

The NRC, on the other hand, is pretty much in the business of delivering bad news in order to head off low-probability, but very bad, potential accidents. People that unpopular need institutional cultures of iron to avoid subversion.

Do you know how I know you're from around the Michigan Indiana border? Because you're pissed about the nuclear waste transport NIMBY mess that meant that the reactor near the Michigan Indiana border had to bury the waste locally instead of shipping it to the middle of the desert.

Not that I'm complaining too hard; a lot of my friends in construction got jobs burying that stuff right next to the worlds largest fresh water reserve (the great lakes). It's just a little ironic that it's not safe enough to spen

This is obviously true, but (car analogies aside) "the argument that Fukushima was just an isolated incident in the 'modern' nuclear power age" is meaningless. Each and every incident is isolated. Whether or not they can be collectively assumed to make some sort of judgement on the safety of nuclear power depends more on your point of view, which will usually remain unchanged.

Some safety features just can't be retrofit into a plant, they must be a fundamental part of a plant's design.

The anti-nuclear lobby fights construction of new plants tooth and nail without proposing any viable alternatives. End result is the next most viable alternative (service life extensions and retrofitting what you can to old plants) is what we get.

1. Up-to-date designs don't matter shit if operators decide to skip regular maintenance and fake the protocols.2. Plants that are designed with the state of the art in mind today WILL become obsolete in 10, 50, 100 years at which point greedy operators will push to continue their operation and corrupt politicians will gladly oblige.

It's nuclear nuts who keep insisting on pushing a technology that is not needed, incredibly complex to operate, and has catastrophic results when (not if) something goes

Well, yes. The anti-nuclear nuts prevented the construction of more nuclear plants. But the fact that we still use the old existing reactors has nothing to do with the anti-nuclear lobby.

It's ordinary economics. Profitability. A management has two choices:1. Keep running the plant. As long as maintenance doesn't become too expensive, that's means income and profit.2. Shut down, and take it down. That's awfully expensive.

Which of the two would you choose, if you had some shareholders breathing down your neck?

Which ones? The Banks or the Governments? Nobody else had any say remember. Those damned kids and their dog/hippies/whatever got no say at all in actual reality.Also remember that it was two very strong nuclear power advocates that knew the science that ended up winding up the government run commercial nuclear programs in the UK and USA - Thatcher and Carter. You do the R&D until you can design something good and THEN you build it. Westingh

If you think the world has continued to use outdated nuclear plants because anti-nuclear demonstrators won't let them build new ones, you are sadly naive and misguided. Old nuclear plants are used for far to long because of PROFIT. Yeah blame random citizens and call them luddites, no one will notice the BILLIONS OF DOLLARS. It was nice to see that the nuclear shills went away for a while there while Fukushima was really bad. I mean a reasoned debate over energy generation is one thing but zomg 'anti-nuclear nuts' are forcing nuclear plants to be dangerous we're 'screwed' is far from that.

Except the Fukushima was not a modern reactor. It was an old design that should have been EOL'ed. As the OP stated designs should have been updated, built and replaced older reactors over the last 30-40 years. How many things do you have that are 30 years old that still work? I have a few, but none as complex as a reactor.

That train of thought works well for China, too. "It works great until it doesn't!" Use that everywhere! My cat food needs more poison in it. I don't want working air bags. We demand even more lead in our drinking glasses! Our financial market demands no more regulation! Oh wait, that's an American invention.

It's still early, but congratulations on posting the most nonsensical thing I've read so far today.

Modern? How can you call one of the oldest reactors in the world, which was originally scheduled for end-of-life decommissioning prior to the earthquake, modern?

Calling Fukushima Unit 1 (or even any of the other reactors at the site, which were newer but still very old) "modern" just eliminates any credibility you have and shows your complete and total ignorance regarding nuclear safety and the improvements in nuclear safety made in the past 40 years.

Browns Ferry is also NOT a modern plant - its reactors are about as old as those at Fukushima, but at least they're not in a tsunami risk zone, and as I understand it US-based reactors have all been retrofitted with hydrogen control systems that would have prevented the hydrogen explosions that made Fukushima so complex. Also, while it got a "red" incident based on failure of a significant control valve, there are backup cooling loops. (Note that the valve in question was in the decay heat removal system coolant loop. Said system functioned as needed a week or so ago when all three Browns Ferry reactors SCRAMed due to a nearby tornado.)

Fukushima had a hydrogen control system that would have safely handled the hydrogen if it had power before it was destroyed in the hydrogen explosion. It had been kept up to date on safety measures, but there is only so much you can foresee, and no one expected the the island of Japan to sink lower into the ocean. I also like to point out that there were multiple other reactors in the same area of Japan that shut down automatically and had no issues; these are all newer safer designed reactors of the type

Wrong. It's not an argument, it's an observation. It may imply an argument, but implying an argument is typically just a ploy to avoid holding a weak argument up for refutation.

Another observation: For every life lost due to Fukushima, there are literally hundreds of lives saved because coal was not burned. The real Fukushima disaster would have been if the plant were never built and operated.

This isnt an argument against nuclear, its an argument about fining the hell out of people who poorly maintain their facilities

If we learned anything from the BP disaster, it is that ex post facto incentives do little or nothing to overcome the probability-blindness humans suffer from. In the case of BP, the people on the rig making the decisions weren't facing fines if they misjudged... they were facing death. They never-the-less made very bad judgments, in particular assigning a clearly failed test of well integrity a passing grade.

Why? Not because they didn't have rational incentives to judge well, but because they were human

Does this further erode the argument that Fukushima was just an isolated incident in the 'modern' nuclear power age?"
Modernity is irrelevant when the contracts go to the lowest bidder, who also cut costs in the name of profit.

Modernity is irrelevant when the contracts go to the lowest bidder, who also cut costs in the name of profit.

You don't think Modernity might have something to do with it along the lines of personal responsibility, amount of shame felt, sense of societal responsibility, etc etc. I think modernity might have a great deal to do with it.

That is exactly the problem. This is no different from the tragedies frequently encountered in coal mines. They cut corners and costs in the name of greater profits. And then when bad things happen, they say "whoops! This is an isolated incident. And we will fire someone for doing what we encouraged and even told them to do!"

The nuclear industry in the US has amazingly fearsome oversight. It happens that I word for a nuclear technology company and I can tell you first hand that "NRC" is mentioned in seemingly every business conversation with numerous and frequent meetings that involve NRC. So if the NRC didn't find this sooner, I have to wonder why. Has the government been cutting back on the NRC? I hope not and if they have, they need to reverse it and fast.

Nuclear energy is the best we have right now. But it also needs to be regulated and monitored closely. No one questions that fact.

That is exactly the problem. This is no different from the tragedies frequently encountered in coal mines. They cut corners and costs in the name of greater profits. And then when bad things happen, they say "whoops! This is an isolated incident. And we will fire someone for doing what we encouraged and even told them to do!"

The problem is in most cases nobody is explicitly told to cut safety. What they are told is "Here is your budget, do everything". Most mid level managers don't have the balls to reply "Sorry can't do everything with that budget", and instead bounce it downstairs to where it finally gets to the team responsible for execution. They're given tasks which take 36 hours per day, and when they don't get done in the timeframe alotted everybody shrugs and says "we will get to it next week".

Something this dangerous should not be in the hands of profit making corporations...the budgets are always set so the profit margin is there. As the plants age the budgets for maintenance need to increase eroding overall profit. Today nobody worries about profit in 30 years.

It is. In fact, cut transmission line from this very plant are the main reason that the entire Huntsville metro area got a great opportunity for a 4-6 day "Gaslight" Con. Because we had no electricity and were using nothing but gaslights. Tornadoes tore apart the grid and support infrastructure for the plant and basically all of Northern Alabama was without power for four days to a week. On the bright side, the plant itself was able to smoothly move into a hot shutdown and smoothly ramp back up when the infrastructure was restored, so they much be doing something right.

Lowest bidder and profit: Capitalists win, Everyone else lose. Dangerous things should not let in the hands of capitalists.

There should be a law saying that if someone put some money in an industry with the objective of making a profit, he should live with his family next to the most dangerous installation he put money in.

Actually the way capitalism works is before building a power plant (or anything else for that matter) it first helps get the people it wants elected elected... then it lobbies for and gets subsidies and loan guarantees... and THEN it builds the unsafe whatever that it couldn't itself afford the risk of building.

In a (true) capitalist system the producer's stance is not to influence the government in its favor but tries to minimize government influence so the market can take control. In a corporatist system the government's goal is to benefit the producer as much as possible to maximize production and output.

I admit it simplifies corporatism a lot (since the theory behind the system actually comprehends corporate groups as the base and the benefactors rather than just a

Cutting cost was not the reason for the Chernobyl disaster, which undoubtedly wasn't in a capitalist country.

Cost wasn't so much an issue in communist countries. No, really. It wasn't. The main issue was nepotism. Not in the traditional sense where it was more who you knew than what you knew (ok, that too, but that was the minor problem), the problem was that your knowledge in Marxism and Leninism trumped your professional knowledge when it came to whether you get a job or not.

Actually, while it was not a contributor to the root cause of the reactor failure (It can't be considered an "accident" - it was more of an act of willfill criminal negligence where the shift supervisor was a good Party man and insisted that a dangerous experiment go forward even though the operators reporting to him were recommending a shutdown), cost cutting WAS a significant contributor to the final severity of the Chernobyl. The Soviets decided that containment structures were too expensive and thus Ch

Whether you're negligent because you want to cut corners or whether you do it because you're lazy and nobody dares to speak up against you 'cause you're a high ranking Party member, where's the difference?

The problem with nuclear reactors is that when things go wrong, it goes wrong in a way that's very hard to control and can have an enormous impact on the health of entire generations. Strong security measures are vital, but what Fukushima has shown us, is that greed and corruption can and will undermine those security measures.

I'm not fundamentally opposed to nuclear power, as long as it is safe and cost effective. But I really doubt whether it can be both at the same time.

If you stop trying hard enough to make fusion work, it just stops working.

The problem is that you need to work so hard (= put so much energy into it) that fusion ends up costing energy rather than producing it.

I agree with you that efficient fusion would be far superior in fission and lack almost all of fission's problems, but it doesn't seem likely that a breakthrough will come soon. Waiting for fusion will cost too much time.

To put it another way, at any instant the fusion reaction vessel contains about 1 second's fuel, whereas a fission reactor contains more than two years fuel. Extrapolating to the limit (which is not reasonable, but informative), in the worst accident possible by the laws of physics, the fusion reactor will blast of one second's output from the plant and then be inert, which the fission reactor will blast off an unknown fraction of that two years output and keep the rest in a dangerously grumbling state.

Still safer than coal. It's exactly like air travel versus car travel. Car travel is more familiar and the damages from accidents are more sparsely distributed, so it is less feared, while in fact air travel is vastly safer by any reasonable measure. Sensational media coverage and uncritical audience politics are killing us.

Not true. Modern designs achieve all three. See for example GE's ESBWR design - cheaper, significantly safer, and more efficient than ABWRs, which were safer and more efficient (not sure about cheaper) than first-gen BWRs.

Unfortunately, Fukushima's units are first-gen BWRs, and in fact were some of the oldest operating reactors in the world.

I tend to agree in many ways. It's not entirely an engineering problem.

The real risks come as a result of our system, which is squarely rooted in human greed and fallibility. We're risk-takers by nature, and the risk/reward equation is skewed toward danger.

For example:

If I'm a CEO and build a reactor, cutting costs by attenuating the safety systems specified by the engineers (e.g. using cheap materials for failsafes, or not installing them at all), my profit goes up. I saved a lot of money during construction, didn't I!

However, if something goes wrong and my poorly implemented safety mechanisms fail, my personal risk is actually quite low. I probably won't notice an impact on my earnings, I certainly won't go to jail, and once the media is done feeding on the corpse of my disaster, it's back to "business as usual."

This is a far cry from the careful designs of the engineer, and the scenario gets played out all the time, in various disciplines (see also: BP oil spill, mortgage-backed securities, etc).

Maybe the solution is to let the engineers control the nuclear industry, soup-to-nuts, and send the MBA's packing?

Place the "Emergency Meeting Room" on top of the concrete tower, and require the company's entire upper management to remain in the emergency meeting until any problem with the reactor is solved. And don't allow resignations from management until a replacement for that position can be found. All of a sudden they'll be MUCH more concerned about the safety of their plants.

what Fukushima has shown us, is that greed and corruption can and will undermine those security measures.

No, what Fukushima showed is that you can build a reactor that withstands a quake ten times the size it is rated to withstand, shut down gracefully (as graceful as a SCRAM can be) and still maintain enough power to engage its emergency cooling, but there's fundamentally no defense against having about the mass of the Great Lakes flung into your face at ~150km/h.

Newer nuclear power stations are protected from flooding, and in fact Fukushima Daini just down the coast from Daiichi survived a similar size wave. They key protection is that the emergency generators were in a waterproof building and thus worked as intended. The ones at Daiichi that failed were flooded.

Actually they are going to re-build the villages destroyed by the tsunami in the same place, so they must think they can prevent another one doing the same again. I got back from Japan at the end of March so things may have changed since then, but at the time there was talk of putting underwater barriers in that remove a lot of the wave's energy.

You're wrong there - had the backup generators been at the top of the hill or possibly merely installed with snorkels, it would have been fine.

Had the reactors been ABWRs with a backup gas turbine inside the big concrete turbine building in addition to the diesel generators, it probably would have been fine. None of the buildings seem to have sustained any significant damage from the tsunami.

Had the reactors been ESBWRs (close to but not yet approved by the NRC), it would have been fine. ESBWRs don't need backup generators for decay heat removal. They don't need ANYTHING for the first 72 hours after a SCRAM, and the only thing they need beyond that is a fire truck to refill the ICCS pools. Probably once they're refilled you have longer since decay heat generation is constantly reducing.

Compared to the processes used by the oil industry, nuclear is not harder to control. The track record shows far fewer out of control events related to nuclear than both hydroelectric and oil. As for an enormous impact on our health, consider that coal power releases significant amounts of toxins into the air and ground worldwide and that is under normal operation. This certainly has an unmeasured deleterious effect on nearly everyone's health.

Compared to the processes used by the oil industry, nuclear is not harder to control.

Your choice of words suggests you think that means it's easy, but not being harder than "practically impossible" really doesn't mean much.

Nuclear isn't perfect, but it is the best we have.

It's not the best we have, it's the second worst we have. You only think it's the best because you look only at the two worst options. It's like being not quite as bad as China. It's like voting Democrat because the Republican guy is even worse. As long as "it's better than coal" is the best thing the pro-nuclear fans can come up with, I suggest we stay away from it.

It's clearly worse than coal, a typical coal plant releases more radiation into the air due to trace amounts of uranium in their coal in one year than the entire lifetime of Three Mile Island. Some coal plant fly ash has such high uranium content that the Chinese are starting to mine it for nuclear plant fuel.It's clearly worse than gas - hydrofracturing operations in the past 5-10 years have sickened more people in the United States than the entire history of nucl

It's a problem with large nuclear reactors. Small designs like the Toshiba 4S where the core is sunk in a sealed vault 30 meters under ground would be much easier to contain so even a catastrophic failure would have very little impact.

When it comes nuclear fuel, the economies of scale may be outweighed by the risks of scale; the more of it you stick in one place, the more dangerous and hard to control it becomes. Loss of control over a minor part of it can easily lead to loss of control of all of it.

The latency for solid cancers caused by radiation exposure is 10 yeares. WHO did a survey of Chernobyl survivors 10 years after the fact and found that there wasn't a significant increase in cancer deaths.

Even today, WHO says that up to 4000 might die of radiation exposure- however, less than 50 have actually died to date from radiation exposure from the disaster.

The problem with nuclear reactors is that when things go wrong, it goes wrong in a way that's very hard to control and can have an enormous impact on the health of entire generations.

Are you aware that the casualties related to the Fukushima plant accident are zero ? OK I'll grant you that maybe some operators at the plant may have decreased their lifespan of a few months due to a statistically significant increased risk of cancer, but that's hardly an "enormous impact" on the health of an "entire" generation.
Please avoid the usual scaremongering headlines of the mass media regarding health and nuclear energy and remember that when deaths are accounted for energy produced, nuclear ener

I recall hearing that about 100000 people have died from coal mining accidents and mining-related diseases. When I tried to verify this recently, I was unable to get a good estimate. Anyone have data on this?

This is nonsense. a) Most of those deads in the fossil fuel industry die in insecure mines in China. b) People with deformations, broken imune system and reduced life expectancy suffer from the Chernobyl incident (20 years ago). Also a lot of babies where born dead in that period and we will see a cancer increase in Japan in the next years. Radiation is killing slowly. BTW some people already died in Fukushima by conamination. And when you look at the liquidators in Chernobyl they paid a high price. c) Why

Their bodies were found Wednesday and required work to remove radioactive materials from them, the utility said. The plant is continuing to release high-level radiation in Japan's worst ever nuclear crisis.

http://english.kyodonews.jp/news/2011/04/82823.html/ [kyodonews.jp]

Your source doesn't say they died of contamination. What it says is that they died about an hour and a half after the quake. Which was about the time the tsunami hit, and well before the plant started releasing any contamination.

When the nuclear power industry was stopped in its tracks by regulations about 30 years ago, development in nuclear power stopped.

However, no alternative exists for nuclear power in many places. All other sources are either too expensive, too polluting, or impractical. Therefore they kept using the same old designs and refurbishing old power plants that, by their original design, should have been decommissioned decades ago.

The first thing to do should be to remove the arbitrary regulations that make it impossible to develop and built new power plants.

Aye, I am all for it. Especially remove the arbitrary regulations regarding liability and let the power companies fully insure their reactors themselves. Wait, what? No insurance company would be willing to do that? Score one for the free market!

We're already hitting crunch time. I sort of doubt even building nuclear plants is going to give us enough energy at this point. The only answer is going to be dirty coal/shale/etc and something like a couple orders of magnitude increase in research to find something else.

There's no secure energy source in the world.Even your fire place and a match box are not secure.
As a rule of thumb, the more energy they produce, the more unsecure.
Then if you take into account the byproducts of a nuclear power plant these considerations rise even more issues.
Even solar panels have drawbacks and generate pollution during the fabrication and the disposal phases. Not to talk about the needed batteries which are not part of the panels, but are a needed part of the setup. And a polluting on

Solar doesn't require batteries. It can feed directly into the grid via an inverter. Solar panels are near 100% recyclable and most manufactures have free recycling schemes. The carbon payback from manufacturing is as low as 1 year.

You also need to stop thinking of solar as a domestic production source - that's just perverse. Solar on industrial scales is already approaching parity with coal power stations and was cheaper than nuclear last year.

And yes, yes, it doesn't produce power at night. Maybe you've heard of power storage, which is already used in many places to help balance grid loads.

There are plenty of challenges, but so many geeks have blinkers on when it comes to solar.

There's a power storage plant a little way from here. It pumps water up a hill when electricity is cheap, and lets it flow down when electricity is expensive. It takes about 15 minutes to completely empty the lake, and doing that doesn't come close to supplying the entire grid load - you'd be amazed at how much power storage is required just to smooth over the current set of power plants' inability to increase supply instantly. With more wind and solar, this requirement would be vastly higher.

"Maybe you've heard of power storage"There's that whole consumption smoothing business that's a real bitch with solar. Power storage capacity in even Germany or Spain, with their huge amounts of renewables, is pitiful. Ideally you would have enough power storage to smooth consumption between the peak and trough loads in your area... in practice, that kind of infrastructure is expensive and largely nonexistent. The biggest consumption smoothing mechanism is calling up power plants and paying them to shut down, or paying power plants to have "spinning reserves," operations running at unprofitable levels that can be quickly ramped up.

This is a problem not just with solar, but with most forms of power production. Nuclear plants can't quickly change their power production to suit demand either. Only gas plants can really do that well. Oil possibly, but not coal.

But we're not yet at the point where this is actually a problem for solar. For the time being, it makes the most sense to take coal plants offline as soon as possible, and invest in a lot more solar. In the mean time, gas can take care of the variations in supply and demand. By the

It is similar in design to the reactors that malfunctioned at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant in Japan after a massive earthquake and tsunami earlier this year.

This shows that the (American-designed) Fukushima plant has design faults replicated in other plants of similar design. The British regulator is now re-examining proposals for new build in the light of the Japanese disaster. It is not at all clear that other designs of reactor have the same problems.

The Browns Ferry Nuclear Plant began construction in 1966 (Fukushima Dai-ichi dates from 1971). Furthermore, both use General Electric boiling water reactors. The major difference seems to be that Browns Ferry is/was expected to continue to operate until 2033.

Similarly designed technology dating from a similar time has similar flaws. In most areas engineers learn from their mistakes and upgrade regularly for precisely this reason. Then we actually would be in the 'modern nuclear age', and discovering a new flaw would be disturbing news as opposed to being a wholly predictable consequence of expecting to keep dodgy, ancient crap running for well over half a century.

And similarly to Fukushima, Browns Ferry has had a natural disaster hit close by.What would have happened if one of those 100+ tornadoes in the area had actually hit the plant rather than just close by?

It seems every time there's a problem with a nuclear power plant, some people trot out the excuse "Oh, it was an old design", like that's supposed to make things better.

The fact remains, we keep nuclear power plants running for decades. Just like all power plants of that generating capacity, nuclear plants are hugely expensive to build, so you need to keep them running for decades to make them cost effective. If we're going to declare nuclear power designs obsolete and unsafe so soon after they are built, then there is no way they will ever be cost justified.

The problem is that any attempt to build new modernized nuclear plants results in massive opposition.

And result is that the next most viable solution (service life extensions to old plants) is chosen.

From best to worst in terms of currently viable baseload generation (wind and solar are not currently viable for baseload, at best they're good for 10-15% penetration, the country with the highest wind/solar penetration in the world is the Netherlands at around 20% and that would not be viable if not for neighb

We won't enter the "modern" nuclear age until we're actually allowed to build modern nuclear plants. Last time I checked the vast majority of reactors running today are old Mark I and Mark II designs from 20-50 years ago.

Firstly, this wasn't the primary, but one of several redundant backup systems. Granted any redundant system not fully tested is not to be considered tested.

Secondly, the NRC has a long and storied history of letting nuclear plants run with known issues based on the promises that they'd be fixed. Now that they're in the spotlight because of Fukishima they're doing this shocking thing and actually calling plants on issues that have been long standing.

Thirdly, as a country we need to take a honest look at our existing nuclear plants. They're old. We've made HUGE advancements in nuclear power (just look at any reactor on a navy vessel) What we need to do is use that knowledge to either reengineer our existing reactors or look to replace them in place with better reactors.

Fourthly, we need to take an honest look at our nuclear fuel cycle, which is retarded. We need to start reprocessing fuel, not just storing it in dry casks. There is a huge amount of wasted energy not being extracted from those rods.

A site was inspected, a problem was found and a rating issued.
How else should this work???? With any luck, the problem will be fixed or the reactor will closed down until it is fit again.
I hope all correcting work will be monitored.I guess if Alabama gets hit by a global axis moving event it may not work too well.

I think the US has more to worry from the Hanford site; but the clean up expertise must be phenomenal.

No, it merely underscores that we do not *have* a "modern" nuclear age.

People, please remember that the vast majority of nuclear reactors in use were built in the 50's and 60's. They were built based on early reactor designs. Reactor designs have improved considerably in the last 20 years but because the public basically has a "no nukes" position, very few new design reactors have actually been built. We are still basically running old reactor designs, many of which are long past their design lifetimes. Until we replace them with modern, safer reactor designs or forms of renewable energy, there will be a danger of another Fukushima/Chernobyl type of catastrophe.

Easy. You compare it to the 100% chance of large radiation releases from coal plants every year, the 100% chance that massive amounts of CO2, mercury, and fine particulate matter will be released, etc.

Following the Fukushima accident I've asked several times about the Davis-Besse [wikipedia.org] near miss. What happened there was that boric acid had beed leaking undetected from a crack onto the reactor chamber for more than ten year. When it was finally discovered, it had eaten through the 20 cm of the pressure vessel's steel (the so-called "first containment chamber"); the remaining barrier containing the reactor's material was the 1 cm (or 5 mm, not clear) internal stainless cladding of the vessel, bearing alone the 170 bars of internal pressure. The cladding had bulged but did not break - by mere luck one would say.

Had it eventually given, then the high-pressure reactor coolant would have escaped in a jet; due to the location of the leak, it could have jammed the adjacent control rod mechanism, preventing insertion of the rods. So the Davis-Besse plant was literally at that time half-an-inch away from a total loss of coolant accident with a core on full power and no way to stop it. Right in Ohio, in the middle of the US. What would have happened then? I've asked several times but the only response I got was basically Nothing to see here, move along [slashdot.org].

Not that I like to dwelve in shaden-freude but really this kind of answer, coming from people who pride themselves so much of being smart and rational, looks disturbing. Shouldn't we try to assess the reality of the situation rather than build a fantasy world that suits our desires, conveniently ignoring uncomfortable facts?

No, you didn't get a "nothing to see here". You actually got an answer. By design, if a water-moderated reactor loses its cooling, it also loses moderation of the neutrons. Fast neutrons don't work as well, so the reaction rate would slow. The residual heat would still have melted the fuel rods and it would be a big mess to clean up, but nobody would have died.

I know it is not the answer you want, but there you have it. It would not have been a Chernobyl-type accident. The Chernobyl reactor had a positive-void coefficient, which means that the reaction rate would go up if cooling was lost. Davis-Besse has negative-void coefficient. The reaction rate will go down if coolant is lost.

From TFS: "Does this further erode the argument that Fukushima was just an isolated incident in the 'modern' nuclear power age?" The plant was build in 1974 [wikipedia.org]
These are old reactors and due to "environmentalist" blocking of building new (safe) ones they are kept functioning. Is it strange they start to rot?

Does this further erode the argument that Fukushima was just an isolated incident in the 'modern' nuclear power age?"

The principles of reliable and robust engineering and risk management do not change no matter how "modern" the device. Fukushima was fundamentally not a failure of technology but one of risk assessment and mitigation. They knew that an earthquake and tsunami combination was a virtual inevitability but they failed to build the seawall protections and backup generator system to withstand the most severe events that could reasonably occur. 9.0 earthquakes occur fairly regularly along the Pacific rim. It was absolutely possible for engineers to build adequate protections but for various reasons (cost undoubtedly among them) they chose not to. Despite the design being an older design the problems at Fukushima still could have been prevented with adequate backup systems and/or improved seawalls.

When auditing risks you evaluate three things: Frequency, Severity, and Detectability. When talking about nuclear plants severe events are fairly rare but the potential severity is extremely high. That's potentially ok if the risk is detectible but as Fukushima illustrates, sometimes flaws are only obvious to the people looking after the fact. Complexity typically increases frequency of problems and decreases their detectability. Nuclear plants are unquestionably complex and some parts of them are difficult to evaluate for problems.

The problem with the analysis is that it's still possible to underestimate or even completely miss a failure mode. The engineers at Fukushima clearly understood the severity part of the equation but they seem to have underestimated the frequency or likelihood of a 15 meter high tsunami and then failed to develop adequate mitigation plans. Sadly this sort of mistake is all too common in every human endeavor.

These are old reactors and due to "environmentalist" blocking of building new (safe) ones they are kept functioning. Is it strange they start to rot?

There is no such thing as a 100% safe nuclear (fission) plant. These plants are designed by people and even the best intentioned people make mistakes. We might decide the risks are acceptable but there will be risks. Newer designs have the potential to be safer (safer not safe) but without adequate risk analysis and maintenance, they can be every bit as dangerous as older designs.

This is pure NRC "look at us, we're better than Japan's oversight" grandstanding. There was no active failure or danger; a bad valve in a redundant cooling system was found during a maintenance shutdown and replaced (that's why they inspect things while the reactor is down). It appears to have been a manufacturing defect, and all similar valves were also inspected after the bad one was found (no other failures were discovered).

This is the same Alabama plant that was shut down due to the recent tornadoes. They lost off-site power and ran the cooling systems on redundant diesel generators without any problem. Obviously the cooling systems worked. This plant had a horrible safety record decades ago and will probably always be under increased scrutiny, but they greatly improved things before bringing the reactors back online. I live about 30 miles east of this plant, and I have no problems with it.

Parse at will... the answer is "yes" but not many, and even fewer if you exclude ones just for testing not hooked to a/the grid. There's quite a few Gen II that have been built recently (and presumably better than earlier Gen II, including precautions for "planes flying into them"...)